Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Fresh from the Nintendo Media Summit, we've quite a few impressions of games coming out in the immediate future. Among them:

• Mario Party 8
• Super Mario Strikers: Charged
• Big Brain Academy
• Pokemon Battle Revolution
• The Bigs
• Boogie
• My Word Coach
• Rayman: Raving Rabbids 2

We're most jazzed for Strikers, especially after reading such effulgent impressions from Penny Arcade. But which game shown at NMS excited you the most? If you were stuck on an island and could only have one game ... you know, assuming you had a Wii and a couple Wiimotes, and a nice TV ... maybe some nunchuks, oh, and the sensor bar, and I guess you'd need a standard 120 W outlet somewhere in the sand ... and a decent supply of food and water, or you wouldn't spend your time playing the Wii ... you know what, never mind.

Trust us. With regular use comes a guaranteed increase in size, or your money back! Girls will flock to you, women will be putty in your hands! After all, we've seen the results firsthand. Yes, that's right, we've sunk quite a bit of our own money and time into this product, and we're just absolutely 100% positive you'll start seeing results within a few weeks. And hey, it's not your fault nature didn't give you a little more to work with! So go ahead and start Training Your Brain, Miyamoto-san, and give those women what they really want: your astronomically high IQ.

- DS Lite: 111,213 52,572 (32.10%)
- Wii: 52,193 351 (0.67%)
- PSP: 27,505 6,928 (20.12%)
- PS2: 10,881 467 (4.48%)
- PS3: 8,659 180 (2.04%)
- Xbox 360: 2,026 79 (3.75%)
- Game Boy Micro: 428 20 (4.90%)
- GBA SP: 330 13 (3.79%)
- Gamecube: 276 39 (12.38%)
- GBA: 33 15 (83.33%)
- DS Phat: 26 13 (33.33%)

[Source: Media Create]

Our friends over at Joystiq have already started enacting nefarious plans against us, planned with their newly enlarged brains. The tiny-brains at Wii Fanboy don't stand a chance against the bigness of their horrible brains.

How did Joystiq get such big old brains? They got a hands-on preview of Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree. And even with their freakishly enlarged brains, they were positive about the game. It contains a series of minigames, each designed to improve one mental ability (Identify, Memorize, Analyze, Compute and Visualize) as well as presumably being fun. In addition to 8-player games at home, you can trade student profiles online to compete with your friends. Check out the screenshots in our People on the Couch Gallery!

[Update: Fixed broken link.]

Surely you've thought at some point, hunched over your keyboard because that damned essay is due tomorrow morning, that words could flow glibly and beautifully from your fingertips, as they do so often at Nintendo Wii Fanboy.

All right, that was a little arrogant. We're sorry.

Anyway. As you very well may know, Brain Age focused fairly heavily on the numerical side of things. Equations = sadness. Did it teach you how to express, or to inspire? Hell no. And so Ubisoft jumps into the brain training genre, with both Wii and DS versions of their literary inculcator, My Word Coach.

There's an in-depth preview over at IGN, and we highly encourage you to peruse their hands-on experience. We'd also like to point out that this game features a simple and effective DS-to-Wii communication feature, in which handwriting performed via stylus is instantly translated into the Wii title, which coincidentally happens to have a far more robust handwriting recognition system than did Brain Age. Is your brain tingling in excitement? We certainly hope so.

We haven't read any research on the particular brain-embiggening properties of Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree, and we're also quite certain that playing it won't result in an actual degree conferral (which is too bad, because we could use some more of those!) Whatever health or brain-bigness benefits it may have, the game certainly looks cute and fun.

Siliconera has posted some impressions of the Japanese version, with plenty of screenshots and explanation of the various minigames involved. We suggest you check it out and dramatically increase the size of the area of your brain that holds Big Brain Academy gameplay details!

It breaks our hearts to see that only a few games on the Wii's roster support Mii integration and WiiConnect24. Nintendo's lack of third-party cooperation might be to blame, but at least the company will be implementing both features with Big Brain Academy for the Wii. Users will be able to import their Miis when creating a student profile, solving the game's reflex puzzles with their customized characters.

According to the latest issue of Nintendo Power, WiiConnect24 will allow other people's Miis to wander into your game, equipped with the student profiles of their creators. You will also be able to test your brain against theirs in any of the multiplayer modes. We're going to be pretty depressed if our friends' Miis turn out to be much smarter than us. At least we have our wit! There's always that, right?

Big Brain Academy won't be coming out in the US until June 11, so there's still some time to hit the books and get your brain in shape. Jeux-France has several dozen screenshots of the game in action along with some Mii artwork. Check past the post break for a few of those images.

We've been spending tons of time with Wii Sports and we never took the chance to check out the Fitness and Training modes. In correcting the situation, we found that each are fairly straight forward and just how you would imagine them; Fitness is a kind of Brain Age semi-clone, yet instead of a brain age you are given a fitness age, and with Training you are taken through several scenarios in each of the sports. Fitness mode is a good deal more in-depth, so initially you'd want to head into Training mode before checking that out so that you can train up before committing yourself to a fitness age the system is looking to label you with.


Continue reading for our first ever Wii Sports Fitness mode trial!

One of our wonderful readers sent us in a tip (note: sending in news tips may or may not increase your chances of becoming a billionaire) regarding Super Mario Galaxy. Turns out, Nintendo's listing of Wii titles has Super Mario Galaxy as only being a temporary name. More importantly, however, is the listing that shows Big Brain Academy (also a temporary name) is headed to the Wii.

Could this mean that a Brain Age sequel will not be releasing on the Wii, with Big Brain Academy being the only brain-training game to hit the platform?

[Thanks Modano!]